Tag Archives: apple

Facebook Solar Array Demonstrates Impotence of Solar Power, Importance of Power Management

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The debate over the so-called “environmental impact” of data centers provides an easy target for environmentalists to pick on — big creepy corporations like Facebook and Apple.  While these folks sleep at night with their hot water tanks cranked to the max and half the lights in their houses still turned on, companies that run big data centers get needled for using a lot of electricity.   Yet just try to take away these people’s iPhones and Facebook games–then stand back and watch the intellectual dishonesty spill out like a broken water balloon.

The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free.  Well, sort-of.  But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.

Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:

  • A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
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  • A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
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  • New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
  • The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.

My conclusions:

  • Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
  • The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
  • Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.

Media talking heads beginning to turn on Apple

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You’re seeing an increasingly resentful attitude towards Apple on a lot of blogs and newspaper outlets these days:  Small but increasingly frequent editorial hints that Apple is no longer the darling underdog, but the resented 1000-pound gorilla that nobody can compete with.  I’ll give you a few examples:

On the day Apple became the #1 vendor of cell phones in the U.S. with 26%, All Things Digital put out the headline: “Android Surges… Apple Flat”.  Now when you’ve just eaten up a quarter of the market, it’s very hard to call you flat, but I’ll digress.  They are looking at OS shipments rather than product shipments.  From Apple’s point of view, the two are the same, and since Android isn’t a first-party OS, Apple gets the last laugh as the market leader. Still, it’s funny that the editor can call Apple “flat” on such a monumental day, especially when Android marketers are a half-dozen deep and Apple is just one company, with just one (or two) handset.   One thing ATD did get right is the fact that Blackberry is dying on the vine.

Another example is in the marching orders of the press corps towards treatment of the Android “family” of products (from a half-dozen different vendors) being treated as a single, monolithic anti-iphone. This depsite the fact that there are OEM features and major platform functionality differences on every handset.   Just compare an HTC to any phone with MotoBlur.  They really feel like entirely different products, but none in such a way that you can say yep this one is the “iPhone of Android devices”.

So I wonder if these journalistic tendencies are driven out of the desire to see Apple take a few bruisings now that they aren’t clawing at Microsoft from the bottom of the 32-bit barrel.

Bubble Sort: Could the Cloud be doomed by lazy programming?

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Something occurred to me today while reading a Seattle Post Intelligencer article about how Pixar uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing solution for rendering its incredibly complex Renderman movie images: Could the availability of extreme computing resources like Azure lead to lazy, less-than-economical programming patterns?

Ie, would programmers be less likely to write highly productive code if less productive, less sophisticated code would yield the same result, given the availability of tons of hardware? And what would this mean in terms of energy conservation, and more importantly, the advancement of human thought?

Put another way, there are many ways to perform a certain computational algorithm, all yielding an accurate result, but all requiring various levels of computational intensity.  I’ll give an example.  First, the bubble sort.  This is a very simple, iterative method of sorting data into ordered lists–a method taught in basic computer programming classes. I first learned the bubble sort while taking Pascal at Cass Tech high school in Detroit.  I thought the bubble sort was awesome, although I later learned that there were other sorting schemes that were far faster and less computationally intense, ie. more economical.

So the hypothesis is this: innovation in more effective programming is lessened by the availability of horsepower.

Rebooted MySpace is what Ping Should’ve Been

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Coming from a small business owner in humble Cleveland, Ohio, the strategic guidance I might give Steve Jobs on his (sad) attempt at building a walled garden social network would be this: sometime it’s better to join than fight. If Apple can’t get its mits on Facebook, it should seriously consider taking over MySpace from News Corp.  In fact, News Corp. has already outed the price tag at $300,000,000, though I think that by the time any potential deal might be struck, that price may come down.  The Facebook train just shifted into fifth gear, after all.

Once upon a time, iTunes had the opportunity to become “indyTunes“, and totally missed the boat.  Right now, MySpace is the MP3.com of the 2.0 era, offering indies more than Apple does in terms of self-service distribution and exposure.  With this rebooted MySpace, a very immersive, very commercialized, very polished experience is in order.  Same idea as iTunes, except that iTunes isn’t nearly as immersive as it could be. Problem one is DRM, which has stimied iTunes’ ability to become totally web-based.  Problem two is Steve, who wants so much control over the ecosystem that he’s not likely, in my opinion, to expand Ping to the wild wild web.

That said, I still think MySpace’s new look rock concert skin is just the veil for the real goods: an audience for Ping.  If Apple wants in on that action, they’re going to have to pick sides, and if Facebook is as snot-nosed as I’ve read regarding Steve, then MySpace might be ripe for the picking.

Dodo Flash

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I’ll keep this one on the record.  Flash is going the way of the dodo–or in the least, is going to be playing a catch-up game very soon.  And while Adobe may be outwardly in denial, the fact that they’ve begun to adopt HTML5 into their development toolset should be a good indication otherwise. I’m not sure I like Apple’s ban on flash in the iOS, but it certainly seems to be having the effect that Steve Jobs was going for–the elimination of a vulnerable competing technology.

Horn-toot: I predicted a PC app store a long time ago

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Apple’s introduction of an app store for the Mac is not only the right thing to do, it’s also long overdue.  I’ve been predicting it since August of 2008.  The last time I wrote about it, I suggested that opening an app store for Mac (and even Windows) would remove barriers to bigtime software distribution while driving down prices.  Both ultimately good things.  I’m glad to see that ol’ Steve finally saw the light.   Wouldn’t have been something if Apple would’ve created the first app store for Windows, too?

iPad/iPhone platform takes the shimmer off OS X

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I couldn’t help but wonder what the iPad hype machine is going to mean for OS X in the long wrong. Sure, OS X is the development environment for the iPhoneOS, but is there enough *there* with the mobile OS to make it the de facto environment of choice for folks like me?

As it is now, iPhone OS does a whole lot of things OS X does not–platform-wide UI support for multi-touch is just the beginning of the list. Still, it seems Apple has gone to great lengths not to cannibalize desktop PC sales, if not overtly saying so. No, iPad is not a desktop replacement, yet.  For starters, it synchronizes with iTunes, meaning that it doesn’t actually run iTunes, so its calendaring and music apps are still very mobile in nature. I also wonder if the lack of a user-facing camera was a design scheme to keep the iPad out of the desktop space, as opposed to a financial consideration to keep down manufacturing costs.

But the brushes app seems like an impressive utility with the potential to offset some productivity that’s normally reserved for the desktop.  And as I type this on a Macbook Pro, I realize that the iPad will never be suitable for video production, or for audio mixing. Even still, I can imagine great uses for multitouch in these kinds of apps.

Without the UI goodies, OS X shimmers less, and I believe it’s only a matter of time before touch-enabled desktop gear starts shipping from Cupertino.

iPad Data Plans Nice, but where’s the tethering?

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All iPads are unlocked and use GSM micro SIMs, so you can use a carrier right away if you have data. No contract: you activate the service directly from the iPad and can cancel any time you want without an ETF. iPad has built-in 3G. Data plans normally cost $60 a month for a laptop. 250MB of data per month is $15 (less than the usual $35). $30 for unlimited — a much better deal. AT&T is providing the service.

Come on AT&T, I still can’t tether my iPhone according to your terms of service!  Brutal.